Wang Hong Fashion Culture and the Postfeminist Time in China

Abstract

This study critically examines post-feminism in Chinese fashion culture through the lens of Wang Hong, young online celebrities and entrepreneurs who sell fashion products. The extensive discussion of post-feminism in the literature has thus far focused primarily on Western contexts, specifically those where young, white, middle-class women embrace the contradictory identity of a freely-choosing, self-pleasing, and empowering, yet calculating, regulatory, and disciplinary subject. I argue that, in the absence of the charged legacy of successive waves of feminist movements that have been the Western experience, Chinese women, exemplified by Wang Hong, are able to embrace post-feminism through their fashion culture and indeed are eager to do so. Through various self-fashioning activities and business endeavors, Wang Hong embody a certain type of femininity that is not only aesthetic and entrepreneurial in the lexicon of freedom and empowerment, but also patriotic in its witting complicity in the market-state nexus that propagates nationalistic sentiments in the pursuit of social and economic advantages. Though unaware of the fragmented feminist moments in China, Wang Hong, nonetheless, demonstrate that post-feminism can take root in local culture through the transnationality of the consumerist, entrepreneurial, and neoliberal yearnings of women around the world.

Keywords:

• postfeminism
• wang hong
• fashion culture
• post-socialist femininity
• China

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful to Jennifer Kang, Jinsook Kim, and Karen Lee for their insightful comments on two drafts of this article. I also thank the anonymous reviewer’s and the editor’s comments and suggestions to tighten up my argument. During the research and writing, I got the generous support from the C-Centre and its C-Grant in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara Liao

Sara Liao is an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Communication at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Her research interests intersect digital labor, activism, feminist studies, globalization, and East Asian popular culture. Her previous work on digital activism, gendered labor in digital platforms, beauty and precarity, imitative practices in gaming culture, among others have been published in journals such as International Journal of Communication, Communication, Culture & Critique and Chinese Journal of Communication. She currently works on theorizing and writing about sexual harassment and misogynistic culture in China. [email protected]